文档介绍：Ancient Civilization
I. Origin of the calendar
Babylonians: year consists of 360 days divided into 12 lunar months
Egyptians:year consists of 36 10-day period
Cosmological Beliefs
Babylonians: The heaven was a hemispherical vault resting on waters surrounding the earth which is a flat disc.
Egyptians: The world is a rectangular box where the slight concave earth is at the bottom. The sky at the top is supported by peaks of four mountains.
Genesis
The world came into existence from a primeval chaos of water, The heaven, earth, air and other objects and forces are a result of the union of the male and female gods of chaos.
Babylonians: younger gods used force to conquer nature
Egyptians: gods are powerful without being violent
Classical Civilization
Pre-Socratic Natural Philosophers
Natural Philosophy in Athens
Greek Science of the Alexandrian Period
Pre-Socratic period
* nature more impersonal than that of previous civilization
Thales - similar views of the universe as that of the ancient civilization but with the disappearance of the sun-god
Anaximander - suggested fire as the fourth basic element; he said that the heavens were concentric about the earth; and living creatures rose from moist element as the sun evaporated them.
Anaximenes- difference between elements were quantitative
Pre-Socratic con’t.
Heraclitus - the idea of retribution to explain the world order
Pythagoras and the Pythagorean School
*founded a school devoted to a life of mathematical speculation
*his name bears the rule for the right triangle
*first to show the relation between the sound and the length of a string
*numbers provide the conceptual model of the universe. They are forms and images of natural objects.
Pythagoras con’t
*The universe was divided into earth, cosmos and olympos
-these bodies are spherical
-heavenly bodies move in circular and uniform motion
-noble bodies move slower than the less noble ones
* The idea that the earth is the center of the universe evolved
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